Help talk:Cite errors

Broken ref: language support

One unresolved issue is that users with a language set to other than en see the default message in the selected language without the link to the help page. {{broken ref/sandbox}} now supports translations of "see the help page" for the top used languages per Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences. The "see the help page" translations are in {{broken ref/lang}} and can be easily expanded. Translations were culled from the various language versions of MediaWiki:Newarticletext. Translations for the main message are already in place in each MediaWiki page. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 13:43, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references for en

Markup	Renders as
{{broken ref/sandbox |msg=Cite error: There are <code><ref></code> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a <code>{{Reflist}}</code> template or a <code><references /></code> tag |lang=en |help=Cite error refs without references |cat=Pages with missing references list }}	Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{Reflist}} template or a <references /> tag (see the help page).

MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references/es for es

Markup	Renders as
Current message	Existen etiquetas <ref>, pero no se encontró una etiqueta <references />
{{broken ref/sandbox |msg=Existen etiquetas <code><ref></code>, pero no se encontró una etiqueta <code><references /></code> |lang=es |help=Cite error refs without references |cat=Pages with missing references list }}	Existen etiquetas <ref>, pero no se encontró una etiqueta <references /> (consulta la página de ayuda).

False negatives

I don't know why there are so many false negatives appear here, i.e. articles that don't actually have any fault. I would estimate at least 50%. The only way I know to clear them is by null edit. There must be one or more background processes which plod through all the pages, occasionally picking on one to mark incorrectly – some of the pages have had no change for as long as a year. It's all very tedious.

John of Cromer in Philippines (talk) mytime= Sat 15:42, wikitime= 07:42, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

There is no bot or other process that goes through periodically and tags articles. Whenever a reference is added, deleted or changed, the Cite.php software extension immediately checks for errors and calls the message. Articles can have stale messages, but you can usually fix that with a purge. If you point out a current issue I can take a look at it. --  Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:04, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

I work through Category:Pages with missing references list. Yesterday it was cleared, twice. It usually gains two or three dozen a day. This morning it had more than 300 items in it. Even now it has 250-ish. At least 80% have no error, but need a null edit to clear them off the list. How/why do they get on the list? Most have not been changed in weeks. I think a reasonable solution would be to make getting on the list a two-step process - since null edit clears the spurious ones, make null edit a part of getting on the list, so that only the really wrong remain. John of Cromer in Philippines (talk) mytime= Sun 00:22, wikitime= 16:22, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Paularo is an example. It is shown on the category page - even after I purge the category - but the category is not listed at the foot of the article. The article hasn't been edited for weeks, and I can't see any recent template or module edit that would account for it. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:41, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Ditto the next one in the category, Pemara. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:44, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

This has nothing to do with the cite system. Per Help:Category#Categories and templates:

Changes to the template, however, may not be reflected immediately on the category page. When you edit an article to add a category tag directly, the list of category members is updated immediately when the page is saved. When a category link is contained in a template, however, this does not happen immediately: instead, whenever a template is edited, all the pages that transclude it are put into the job queue to be recached during periods of low server load. This means that, in busy periods, it may take hours or even days before individual pages are recached and they start to appear in the category list. Performing a null edit to a page will allow it to jump the queue and be immediately recached.

The template {{broken ref}} is used to control the messages. This can happen to any article in any category for any error message. --  Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 17:29, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm confused. Please have a look at the history of Pemara and of the few templates it uses. I can see no reason for that article to have been placed in the error category at any time in the last few weeks. The article has had one edit this year, unrelated to its referencing; and according to the list displayed below the edit box, only one relevant template has changed since 26 February, and that edit was unrelated to referencing. Yet Johnmperry states that the error category was clear yesterday. So how did the article get into the error category today? -- John of Reading (talk) 19:56, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

I don't know. Ask at WP:VPT. --  Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 21:23, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for investigating. I'll save some snapshots of the category in my sandbox and post some solid evidence at VPT if I catch one misbehaving. -- John of Reading (talk) 06:46, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

I did take it to WP:VPT and a bug has been opened. Main question remains, what is causing dormant pages to be reassessed? John of Cromer in Philippines (talk) mytime= Sun 18:41, wikitime= 10:41, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

An article is queued for re-assessment whenever there is an edit to any template or LUA module that it uses. Recently there have been many edits to much-used citation and other templates as part of the switch to LUA. It is therefore quite likely that the queues are long, so that the article is re-assessed at a random time some hours or days after the last template edit. But, as the bug report says, that doesn't explain why the articles are dropping into the error category. -- John of Reading (talk) 11:11, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

I was wondering about that. I have been involved in the Citation Style 1 updates to Lua and we noticed the job queue, but Wikidata was also involved at the time. --  Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:20, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

BTW, to answer a question above, the probable reason Pemara was re-assesed for categories (A RefreshLinksJob was run in tech speak) was most likely this edit to template:Hesperiinae. (That is of course a guess though). Its impossible to know if a change on a template will affect references (or categories), so any change causes the entire page to be reparsed. Bawolff (talk) 22:12, 10 April 2013 (UTC)